Conventional crime story about a straight-arrow, clean-shaven, uniformed cop who gets bent, not broken, as a lightly bearded, Versace-attired undercover narc. It is filled with facile plotting and precipitous character development. It drips with glib cynicism about the Feds' commitment to the War On Drugs. It holds down the "emergent" …
Con man named Thomas Jefferson ("Jeff") Johnson gets himself elected to the seat vacated by a deceased congressman named Jefferson Davis ("Jeff") Johnson. A pert and pretty consumer-rights advocate leads him into romance and conscience. Eddie Murphy is permitted to do plenty of "funny" voices (a couple of them -- …
Derek Jarman, putting the Christopher Marlowe play on screen, turns up the homoerotic content to full flame (a tango, a torch song, etc.). He connects the homophobia of old to our present day by way of a steady bombardment of anachronisms: suits and ties, military khakis, machine guns, riot gear, …
Somewhat tardy and parochial social satire (formerly called Spotswood) on labor unrest in mid-Sixties Australia. An "efficiency consultant" (Anthony Hopkins, seriously, not comically, tortured as usual) is hired to evaluate a one-big-family manufacturer of "casual footwear," chiefly moccasins. What develops is an amiable variation on Other People's Money, with a …
An attempt to horn in on the E.M. Forster concession: inhibited Britishers "opening up" in balmy Italy. (The original novelist in this case is the considerably less stellar Elizabeth von Arnim.) The drizzly gray color seems appropriate enough for the opening scenes in London, but the image -- resolutely "stylish" …
A comedy about, and for, the present-day teenage Neanderthal. But not with. Sean Astin and Pauly Shore are a bit long in the tooth for the Encino High seniors who dig up a block of ice in the backyard with a living caveman -- don't ask how -- inside it. …
The movie equivalent of the kind of novel that no self-respecting literary critic would condescend to notice: one of those sweeping, sprawling, flag-waving, button-popping, bodice-ripping, lusty, busty historical romances that have "best-seller" written literally all over them — all over their paperback covers at any rate, in close proximity to …
Can a movie with that title possibly be funny? A British-accented French farce (the title on screen is spelled out The Favour, etc.) of grim whimsy, desperate impiety, exasperating mistaken identities, aggravating missed connections. The perspiry comic style of Bob Hoskins, the air-conditioned comic style of Natasha Richardson, and the …
So-so court-martial melodrama in the vein of The Caine Mutiny, juiced up with several megatons of Star Power: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, and, a couple of comparative firecrackers, Kiefer Sutherland and Kevin Bacon. It's intermittently entertaining, though never dramatically involving, to watch these people throwing everything they've got …
A frosted-haired, bug-cute psychotherapist (Richard Gere) gets sucked into a quag of incest, infidelity, "pathological intoxication," murder, sotto voce dialogue, fat lips (Uma Thurman's), fatter lips (Kim Basinger's), shadows, fog, blue light. George Fenton's musical score tries hard to make you think of Hitchcock, by way of Bernard Herrmann. Perhaps …
Second in John Duigan's promised trilogy on coming-of-age in the Sixties. The mood is set this time not by Vaughan Williams's "Lark Ascending" but by the little pastoral interlude in Vaughan Williams's "Wasps Overture." The hero, first met in The Year My Voice Broke, is now away at a militaristic …
Flat, drab, dismal film about a pink-cheeked Dutch boy awakening to his homosexuality in the last days of World War II. By the time he fully wakes up to it, in the arms of a Canadian "liberator" (a tender and respectful pedophile), the audience is apt to be asleep. In …
Something of a cross between Late for Dinner and, oh, let's see, out of unnumbered E.T. imitators, let's pick Starman. Ostensibly an ode to emotional openness and honesty, formulated in terms of a science-fictional gizmo and an unlikely chain of plotmaking convenience. The gizmo -- what looks like a locomotive …
A racer named Furlong (ha-ha) is yanked out of his car by reverse time-travellers an instant before his "fatal" crash, and is whisked to the year 2009, to undergo a mind-transplant with a recent decedent, temporarily on hold at the Spiritual Switchboard. But he escapes. There's a chase, then another …